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Hi everyone, and welcome to my bi-lingual English Italian blog! Here you will find every post written firstly in English and then (badly!) in Italian. I welcome all your suggestions, comments, emails and (above all) your corrections!

domenica 7 dicembre 2008

Hi everyone! Is there anyone out there who has an iPod Touch or an iPhone 3G? If so, I’ve just stumbled across a brilliant new application that I’m hoping will really help me with my Italian studies!

I’ve been reading a lot of Italian books lately (at least 100 pages each day) and I’ve realised two things.

Firstly, my reading pace has improved greatly, and I’m now reading almost as quickly in Italian as I do in English, and I rarely need to look up words or expressions in the dictionary.

However, although I recognise more and more words when I see them written down on the page, my overall vocabulary hasn’t really improved very much at all.

If I hear one of my newly learnt Italian words or expressions spoken (e.g. on a radio programme) I can usually recognise it and remember what it means, but this isn’t true for when I’m trying to remember the word from scratch, such as when I’m speaking or writing in Italian. Without the Italian words written down in front of me (preferably with some context to illuminate their meaning) I can rarely remember what they are! It’s as though they’ve been sucked into some big black hole, never to be seen again!

I’ll use the verb ‘trattenersi’ to illustrate what I mean. When I’m reading this word I can gather from the context that it means to hold oneself back or to exercise one’s self-restraint in some way, but if I’m speaking Italian and I want to say something like: “Oh yeah, that guy made me so mad! I really had to hold myself back so that I didn’t say something I’d regret…” I simply can’t think of the word for ‘hold myself back’. I think to myself: ‘Now I KNOW there’s a verb that means to hold oneself back, but what the hell is it?’, and my mind is usually a complete blank!

It’s incredibly frustrating and demoralising!

So this weekend I decided to do something to remedy the problem! Obviously the issue is that I’m reading or hearing the words but that I’m not really learning them! They’re going in one ear and out of the other, and only 1 in 50 is actually lodging in my memory banks. Patently just reading and listening to podcasts isn’t enough to make the words stick…I need to actively try to learn them by rote (something that I was hoping to avoid doing, since I was hoping my vocabulary would improve organically by osmosis and repetition!)

Writing lists of words in a notebook to learn by heart doesn’t really work for me since I have the attention span of a gnat, so I tried to find a more interesting approach. I stumbled across a website called WorkLifeStudy.com, which has a flash card application that you can download for free onto an iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is incredibly easy to use, and it’s absolutely brilliant for language learners! You can create your own sets of flash cards on your Mac or PC, and upload them immediately onto your iPhone or Touch, then review them whenever you have a spare few minutes. I have a huge backlog of words to learn so yesterday I created 28 separate sets of flashcards (each set containing 25 cards) and uploaded them onto my iPhone, and my plan is to thoroughly learn 50 words/expressions a day, so that by the end of a fortnight I’ll have cleared my backlog and can start reading books again to generate some new words and expressions.

If you use the smallest font, there is enough room on each side of the flashcard for around 790 characters (including spaces), giving you the ability to create flashcards with several sample sentences to illustrate how the words appear in context, or to import entire portions of text. As an example of this, the site illustrates how the full text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address fits onto two sides of a single flashcard. Pretty impressive, huh?

I’ll try to use the cards consistently for a fortnight and give you an honest appraisal of my progress…but judging from first impressions this seems like a really useful application!

If you don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch there are other desktop-based applications that do the same sort of thing. One of these is called Supermemo, and you can read a review of the system here. Unfortunately I can’t use Supermemo as it’s not Mac-compatible, but it too sounds like a pretty good product.